Backlink Checker - Why are backlinks important and how to check your website's link popularity

Why are backlinks important?

When a new website is created, it exists in isolation, there are no other websites linking to it. When a search engine crawls a new website it decides how relevant
the content is on the website for a particular keyword search. This is as far as the early web went and it was a time when content manipulation was at an all time high!
It was easy to fool a search engine into think that a website was mot relvant for a particualr keyword.

Then along comes Google and changes everything. Suddenly, it's not only your content that is important, but it's also now about how important others say your content is.
Google's PageRank system was created to give an indepedant analysis of how reelvant a particular web page is for a perticular keyword search

So, what is a backlink and why do you need to check them?

A backlink, is simply a link from one website to another website. A link is reference, a citation from someone, but not all links are created equally.
A basic link looks like this www.google.com/webmasters/

So, here the link simply contains the domain name, there is no other reference to the linked to website, no mention of what the linked to website might be about.
A search engine's crawler (spider) comes along and follows the link and asigns some value to the link. The value attributed to the link depends on the link itself
and the authority of the website giving the link.

The next type of link is more valuable, www.google.com/webmasters

It may not be apparent to you why this link is more valuable because it looks the same as the first link right? Hover your mouse over the second link and
you'll see the 'mouse over text' shows 'Google's SEO Forums'. Now when the search engine crawls the links, the can put the link in context,
i.e. this link goes to web page that is associated with Google + SEO + Forums. Now someone is searching on Seo forums or Google SEO or Google Forums or SEO Forums,
this backlink is going to play a part. The search engine is going to assign more value to this link than the first link

Now, a third way of linking, lets say I link to the same website like this, ...for some great advice I'd recommend Google's SEO Forums....

This link has text in the actual link, or link text as it's called! Now when the search engine spider comes along it reads the link text and also, there is additional
text in the link title, i.e. hover your mouse over the link and you'll see the text, 'Search Engine Optimsation'. This is giving the search engine even more information on the lined to website and again can be more valuable than the link with the title text only.

One other thing to look out for when looking at backlinks is to understand what the 'no follow' tag means. As backlinks became more important, people began to get
increasingly inventive in finding ways of bumping up their back link profile. A lot of this activity amounted to SPAM, and to help stem the tide of this growing seo technique,
website owners started using the 'no follow' tag. This means that if I put a no follow tag on Interleado's blog, any backlinks from the blog to other websites would be ignored by
search engines. Note, it will not stop the search engine following the link, but no relevance will be assigned to the link and so for the spammers,
there is no advantage in getting these backlinks.

How can you check your website's link authority?

Here is s a short video of how you can check your website's authority using Interleado's SEO Workbench